The Boston Red Sox have again earned their way to the World Series, which offers a reminder of just how many Upstate baseball fans - as in our own Brent Axe - are passionate Red Sox loyalists. Many people might wonder why those folks wouldn't prefer the Yankees or the Mets, teams from our home state.

As for me, I'm Gaelic enough - thus mystic enough - to tell myself that it's subconsciously rooted in an ephemeral Upstate truth (or, more accurately, in a grand and lingering Upstate baseball injustice). Whenever the Red Sox play for baseball's greatest crown, I stop and remember the roots of that Boston club, and where it originally was supposed to play:

Herm loves to visit the places where ballparks once stood in great cities; he believes you can still somehow sense and feel what happened there. He sent me a note recalling how hundreds of students walked by, unaware that they were passing the spot where the first World Series game was played in 1903, with the visiting Pittsburgh Pirates losing to homestanding Boston ...

A team that only two years earlier seemed bound for Buffalo - and might have gone there if not for those Huntington Avenue Grounds.

The Buffalo Bisons in Syracuse, 2013: A pivotal 'what if' in Major League history.Stephen D. Cannerelli | scannerelli@syracuse.com

The story goes like this: In 1900, Ban Johnson saw a chance to elevate the old Western League, which he envisioned as an eventual big league equal to the established National League. One of the Western League franchises was in Buffalo, then the eighth-largest city in the nation. Johnson, the league founder, promised the backers of that Buffalo club they'd be part of the new effort he intended to call the American League.

Johnson kept that promise - or seemed to keep it - right up to the league's organizational meeting in January 1901. What the principals from Buffalo couldn't know was that Johnson badly wanted a franchise in Boston, and that he sent eventual Hall of Famer Connie Mack there to see if it would be possible to create a ballpark in time for the new season. Mack came back believing that a new club could play at Huntington Avenue ...

So that is the origin story for the Boston Red Sox, who came within an eyelash of being the Buffalo Bisons. To compound the sting, the first manager of the Boston team then known as the Pilgrims - and the guy who guided Boston to victory in baseball's first World Series, in 1903 - was Hall of Famer Jimmy Collins, a Buffalo native and a former Bison who'd return to his hometown once his career was done.

And consider this: Every city in the original American League - Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, Washington, Baltimore, Cleveland, Milwaukee and Chicago - has a Major League franchise today in one form or another (sometimes by expansion or relocation), either in the AL or NL.

Would Buffalo still have a team? Would the city's fortunes have been changed by the presence of big league baseball? Maybe not, although I've often wondered if all the longstanding Buffalo sports woes can be traced back to the Curse of Ban Johnson.

The simple truth is that Buffalo was supposed to have the team that became today's Red Sox, and the "what ifs" are too outlandish even to contemplate, but maybe - just maybe - the reason so many Upstate fans root for the Sox is because of what Whittier described as the saddest of words, especially at World Series time: